Gardening by state
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Every US state has three pages here: the hardiness zones it spans, the plants recorded as native to it, and a planting calendar. None of them is written from general impressions. The zone range comes from the 2023 USDA hardiness zone map produced by the PRISM Climate Group, the frost dates come from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information 1991-2020 U.S. Climate Normals, and the native records come from USDA PLANTS distribution data. Where the weather stations inside one state disagree among themselves, the page shows the spread rather than picking a single number to print. States are large, and an average that hides a six-week difference between a mountain county and a coastal one is worse than no average at all. A state page is a starting point for the questions that follow, not a substitute for the ZIP-code tools.
Everything in this section
What's here
Pick your state below. Its page carries the range of zones the state spans, its first and last freeze dates with the number of weather stations behind them, and links to the native-plant list and the planting calendar for that state. The calendar is worked out from the freeze dates rather than printed as calendar months, so it says how many weeks before or after your own last freeze a crop goes in. That is the form the extension sources use, and it is the form that still works in a late spring. The native-plant page lists the species USDA PLANTS records as occurring natively in that state, with the status it records for each. Native is a distribution fact rather than a recommendation: a plant native to your state may still be wrong for your garden, and a plant that is not native is not thereby a problem. Noxious and invasive listings are a separate matter, recorded per state on each plant's own page and always named to the list they came from, because a plant can be listed in one state and sold freely in the next. Frost dates and zones answer different questions, and most planting decisions need both, so the tools are linked from every state page.